Wampum

Over at Slate Jacob Weinburb waxes lyric on McCain the misunderstood. If Slate had an NDN writing for it, the decoding could have taken a detour through the Dakotas, or at least Oglala I and Oglala II, which reversed Sioux Nation, which created a trust duty, that most of the subsequent legislation and litigation has affirmed voided, concerning any theory of trust responsibility by the US to Indian tribes for subsurface rights (coal, oil, gas, metal). John's been a major player in the law of the west, mining the same veins as pols from Texas and Wyoming who work the hydrocarbons-and-minerals rackets.

It doesn't take an NDN to write about how McCain is working his way up and down the '00 GOP primary A list, putting some under oath, and tending towards resignation, indictement, trial and even sentencing, and coming close enough to others to take the wind out of their sails, or shape their course to leeward. But it helps, and we've MB.

The visual is from the NSF page on the wicked complecated proof by Wiles of Fermat's Last Theorem that there were no positive integer solutions for x³ + y³ = z³, x⁴+ y⁴ = z⁴.

I say "wicked" because in 1984 I worked through the Furstenberg, Katznelson, Orstein (1982) ergodic theoretical proof of Szemeredi's Theorem, which states that any subset of integers of positive density must contain arithmetic progressions of arbitrary length, and presented the proof at a colloquia at Berkeley. It is one of the milestones of combinatorics, and the notion of proving some number theoretic property about arithmetic progressions from measure theory is one of those running about the streets of Syracuse naked laughing and shouting kinds of things. The idea of actually proving FLT via Selmer groups, Hecke algebras, elliptic curves, modular forms, Euler systems and Galois representations (Taniyama-Shimura) is even more so. I'll probably die before I work through the Wilies proof.

Since I don't read Slate, not being kwel or anything, I'm grateful that Stirling Newberry did. In the interests of full-disclosure I've been defenestrated twice as many times by Marcos Moulitas as Stirling has.

For our NDN readers, and those mildly concerned that the GOP probably ought not be the direct beneficiary of the largest asset transfer west of the Mississippi, or at least ought to share the booty, John's elevation to the Oval means the Individual Indian Trust claim will be settled ... for fractional pennies on the long tonne. It will be mathematically beautiful. Nake't White Men will run through the streets shouting "I GOT IIT! I GOT IIT", and Russ Feingold may as well be as dead as Paul Wellstone for all the good campaign finance reform is going to be post-IIT.